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Fire Thunder gave Good Bear a nod, then stepped back as the slow procession of burros started down the mountainside on a separate path from that which was used to bring the longhorns to safe pasture.
Black Hair went to Fire Thunder. “My daughter, she is such a worry,” he said, his head bowed.
“You will in time work things out,” Fire Thunder said, taking the reins of his horse. He swung himself into his saddle. “Let us go and see to our longhorns.” He laughed throatily. “We have some changes to make, do you not agree?”
Black Hair eased into his saddle and grabbed his reins. “I find it hard to concentrate now that I am back at home, where my daughter disappoints me over and over again,” he said thickly as he rode off with Fire Thunder through the village.
At first sight, when anyone came to call on the Kickapoo, the village of wigwams, with an occasional Mexican jacal, hut, seemed to sprawl randomly through the valley.
But upon closer examination, one perceived that it was laid out according to a plan. The village had been built at the site of eleven crystal-clear springs, protected by a sharply rising hill.
Fire Thunder and Black Hair passed across a large cleared plot of land where ceremonial ballgames took place, then rode onward to where great seas of grass provided food for their cattle.
“How can you let your worries about your daughter linger in your mind when you have this to please your eyes and your heart?” Fire Thunder said. He swung his hand in a wide arc before him toward the great herd of longhorns grazing peacefully on the tall, thick, sweet grass.
“Can you tell me that you do not have a woman still bothering your heart?” Black Hair said, giving Fire Thunder a lingering stare. “Or have you forgotten the woman with the green eyes and raven-black hair?”
Fire Thunder’s heart skipped a sensual beat at the very mention of the woman that he had seen with the carnival caravan. He gave Black Hair a slow smile. “Thinking of that woman is much different than thinking of a daughter,” he said, laughing huskily. “And, yes, she is still on my mind.”
“Is it not a waste of time to keep thinking about her?” Black Hair taunted. “You will never see her again.”
“Perhaps yes, perhaps no,” Fire Thunder said, shrugging.
When they reached the other warriors, who were heating branding irons in a small fire, they both drew tight rein and dismounted.
Women, daughters, and otherwise were soon forgotten in their anger as they checked the blotched attempt of the Texans to change the Kickapoo brand.
“The fools,” Fire Thunder grumbled. “Yet they surely sold many at the market before we came and claimed the rest as ours again. Those who bought the steers looked the other way.”
“Yes, the penalty for stealing cattle seems to depend, in large part, on who you are, and how you did it,” Black Hair said, placing his fists on his hips. “Longhorns are comparable to the nuggets of gold that miners find in creek beds. If a white man brings a steer to market for another white man to buy, and it is known, without actually saying it, that the steer came from Indian stock, nothing is done about the theft.”
“That is for certain, for any man who knows our brand would have seen it on these longhorns, that the brands have obviously been changed,” Fire Thunder grumbled. “And who is to say where the longhorns were finally sold? At which marketplace? Texas longhorns can be driven one thousand miles to market with almost no ill effects.”
He went and stood over a steed as one of his men held it with his lasso, while another prepared a red-hot branding iron. The branding iron was in the form of the traditional Kickapoo mark—a circle with a hook. By varying the direction of the mark and the place it was branded on the longhorn, different members of the tribe were able to identify their animals so that the whole herd could be kept together without any man losing his property.
As Fire Thunder watched the brand sizzle while being placed on the rump of the longhorn, he grew even more somber. “We were forced to leave our land in Wisconsin because of the extinction of fur-bearing animals by not only whites, but also the Iroquois,” he said, his voice low. “We Kickapoo have been victims of battles, treaties made and broken by the white man, and encroachment on our lands. Then, too, came those who stole our cattle.”
He turned glaring eyes to Black Hair. “But never again,” he hissed. “We, the Coahuila Kickapoo, have now amassed a herd of some three thousand cattle. No one will be allowed to take even one head of that cattle from us again. We have worked hard to improve the stock, importing expensive blooded bulls, breeding them to choice native cows. No one will get near them, except for those men at the markets we choose to take them to.”
He swung himself into his saddle and rode away.
Alone, he rode his horse to a prominent shelf jutting out to the east of the ridge, and surveyed the surrounding land. He looked at the grasses and pines, absorbing the panorama that belonged to his people.
He could see the reddish-brown wapiti, the elk.
In the valley below stood many elk, all ages, both male and female. Two elks were grazing in a stream bed.
Then he saw two elks mating, and his mind returned to the beautiful, alluring white woman. He wondered where she was; how faraway she was from his home in Mexico.
He felt this strange longing, as though she might be near.
He did not feel foolish thinking that even she might have similar longings, and that she might be thinking of him. The moment their gaze had met and had held, something had been exchanged between them. It was as though their destinies had intertwined at that moment into one destiny charted in the heavens.
“I have never experienced this before,” Fire Thunder cried as he stared up at the blue sky. “Why do I now? Why?”
Chapter 3
She’s loveliest of the festal throng,
